1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to portable meter reading devices which are utilized to compute and prepare a customer utility bill at the customer location upon input of selected utility meter readings.
2. Prior Art
As is customary in utility billing procedures, the utility companies dispatch men to business and residence locations of its customers to take periodic readings of electric, gas and water meters. These readings are then entered on work sheets and sent to the central office for computation of a customer bill for mailing to the various customer locations. Thus, the total billing procedure usually takes a matter of between four and seven days and involves numerous personnel at the central office to carry out the billing and mailing operation.
Although modern day telemetering methods permit an automatic reading of various utility meters followed by transmission of coded data indicative of the meter readings to the central office, these automatic readers are quite expensive to install and also entail a rental fee for use of the telephone communication lines. In addition, many of the automatic metering systems do not provide a tamper-proof device which ensures an accurate billing.
Prior art billing devices are illustrated, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 1,087,902 to Hall and in U.S. Pat. No. 3,590,220 to Yokohama et al. Such devices, although portable, are cumbersome to operate and involve many electromechanical parts susceptible to malfunction and breakage. The Hall device must be physically connected to each utility meter in order to actuate its electromechanical mechanism. The Yokohama device involves numerous printing and reading procedures with sequential shifting of the customer recording tape and card in order to complete a customer bill.
A simple portable billing device has been developed by the inventors herein and is described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,842,248 issued to Neil K. Yarnell and Leland S. Prince. Such a device uses a manual input of a plurality of parameters to provide the final output customer bill. The instant invention represents an improvement of this prior art device in that a minimum number of input parameters need be manually fed into the machine by the operator, and, additionally, further processing at the central office is facilitated by use of recording pertinent billing information on a removable memory storage device.